


Burnout

by intodusk



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Drug Abuse, F/F, Recovery, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-27 01:50:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19780786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intodusk/pseuds/intodusk
Summary: After tinkering with tech she doesn't understand, Squealer finds herself stranded in the past with a half-fried ride and no drugs. Her only anchor in this era is a stressed-out, curly-haired college student who could hardly be more different from her. Her solution? The world's most awkward road trip, of course.





	Burnout

“Aw, waddaya _mean_ there's no coke?”  
  
With the silver sedan situated in the makeshift garage, Adam killed the engine. He hopped out of the driver's side, punched the button on the wall that closed the garage door, and powerwalked to the popped trunk.  
  
“I _mean_ ,” he spat, literally, “there's no fuckin’ coke.”  
  
Sherrel whined like a hungry dog. “How d’we run for Colombians and not have any coke?”  
  
He cackled, his affronts to dentistry on full display, and for the first time since she was last sober she winced at the sight. “Mateo’s Argentinian, dipshit. And we got no coke _‘cause_ we're running it. As in, _selling_.” He dug through the trunk, tossing bags and rags out of the way and scattering them around her cramped little workshop. “An’ somedays that means we gotta send it all out for pushing, ‘cause it's selling like cunt-flavored hotcakes.” He paused, face twisting in thought. “Hotcunts,” he muttered to himself. “Cuntcakes?”  
  
“But I haven't had a hit in, in days, I think- yeah, days! _Da-hays!_ ”  
  
“Fuck do you need just coke for when we got near everything else under the knobslobb’rin sun? Hit the needle again if yer so put out. Or better yet, jam some addies down your spoogefunnel so you can really get workin’. You're gonna need it!” He leaned down and hefted something up into his arms, voice squeezed with the strain. “Feast… your eyes… on _this_ bad bitch, bitch!” He dropped it onto a rusty table with a resounding thunk.  
  
‘This bad bitch’ was some kind of metal cage or frame around a glass cylinder that itself housed an arcane core of coils, cables and nodes. The whole thing was maybe three feet long and wider around than Adam's torso. Modules and panels covered the cap-like metal sections on either end, each one's purpose less intuitive than the last.  
  
He huffed. “Shitlickin’ Christ that thing's heavy. Shoulda got Luke to carry it instead.”  
  
Before she could even tell it to her power was feeling out its shape, turning nonsense into halfsense, extracting hypotheses from measurements and arrangements. She could almost feel it physically as her power outpaced her brain and the distance started to become dissociation.  
  
She slapped her hands to her cheeks to snap out of it, then dragged them through her unwashed blonde hair. “Shit, baby, what even _is_ that?”  
  
With all the panache of a car salesman lauding a lemon, he slapped it on one of its endcaps and said, “Gen-yu-ine _Toybox project scraps_ , you lucky fuck.”  
  
“Yeah, pull the other one, hon.” She pouted. “This is just reject shit from that new Ward again, ain't it? The hoverboard kid?”  
  
“Be any less grateful, why don't ya. Luke was down half his favorite trash pile after nabbing that. But nah, this is the real goddamn deal. Almost lost an arm liberatin’ it from some cock goblin who stole it from some other cock goblin.” He rolled up one thin, torn sleeve to reveal a cut low on his bicep. It was short and shallow, only just deep enough that she thought he might have scraped himself squeezing through a cut chain-link fence. He ran a finger along its meager length. “Bitches love scars, yeah? This do it for ya? Rev yer fuckin’ engine?”  
  
For once, Sherrel didn't have the energy to play along. “I- yeah, ‘course I'm grateful, but- but I've been off half my shit for, like, twice too long, baby! If I get goin’ on this now I'll come out of it doin’ worse than the fiends on the street!” She slumped into a rolling chair, the only one left that still rolled at all. Her fingers scratched at the arms unconsciously. “We don't even have any of those little orange pills from Canada, anymore,” she whinged.  
  
He scoffed and tugged his sleeve back down. “Well fuck me bloody for trying, then. Jus’, tinker your heavy little heart out for a while, and before ya know it, we'll be getting s’more’a what you need.”  
  
He swaggered past her, shaking his head. “I'll be in th’ tower. Don't blow our whole shit up.” He exited through the door to the lighthouse proper and slammed it behind him.  
  
She tried to slump into the chair again. When she realized she was already slumped, she tried to slump harder, abusing the reclining function until she was almost horizontal. She hated when he went up the tower. He knew that, when she got bad like this, she didn't trust herself to be able to make it up the stairs to the top without introducing her skull to the steps. He'd sit up there all night sometimes, lighting up with Luke or whoever, leaving her all alone in the lighthouse’s gift-shop-turned-workshop.  
  
And it wasn't like they ever ran out of goodies for him, of course. When they were low on personal stashes, or when something was selling too good to keep for themselves, it was always _her_ coke, _her_ smack, _her_ little orange pills. They never wanted for his benzos, or, god forbid, his crystal.  
  
She groaned and struggled to her feet. She could bitch and moan about how unfair the world was all night, but when it came down to it, she was still on the verge of withdrawals, and for now there was only one distraction available to her. She picked a tire iron off the ground, more to feel its weight in her hand than anything else, and stood over the bad bitch of alleged Toybox origin.  
  
Her power revved up, potential functions and adaptations coming to mind faster than she could latch onto. The tinkering haze crept into the edges of her consciousness. The rest of her fantasized about getting out of the workshop for a while, taking a joyride out to somewhere new and distant, far from stress and work and lighthouses.  
  
Her power turned her head to look at the dinky little Honda Civic Adam had stolen. As she climbed into the backseat of her own brain, some part of her got snagged on a memory, a movie she'd liked- loved, really -where no distance couldn't be crossed with the push of a pedal and burning rubber. She wrapped it close around her as the blueprints took over and she succumbed to a waking, working sleep.  


☲

  
Sherrel came to in a daze. Sensation returned piecemeal, starting with the familiar pungence of oil and recent shopwork and working up from there. She was folded over something hard and cool, and a bit uneven. She made an effort to pull herself up and was made aware of a pounding headache for her trouble. Her stomach clenched and she dry heaved. Her parched throat protested the abuse in turn.  
  
Luckily, she was no stranger to the aftermath of tinkering sessions or the early symptoms of withdrawl. She lifted up off of whatever she'd been bent over and navigated to her main tool table by the things her boots bumped into on the way. Her eyes were closed; opening them was not a smart choice just yet. When the leather scuffed against what felt like a spare tire, she stopped and placed a hand on the table just beside it, steadying herself. Her other hand, groping blindly, found her huge water jug. It took both hands to lift up to her mouth but each quenching drop was worth any strain right then.  
  
Once her stomach started to settle she slid her goggles up to rest on her forehead and opened a single eye, just a crack.  
  
“Fuuuh-uh- _uuuck_ …”  
  
Sight came back blurred and burning. Prying her lids apart was an exercise in patience and pain tolerance. It took minutes for her to make out the state of her tools table, wrenches and such scattered everywhere. When she thought she could stand it, she turned around to get a good look at the product of her work.  
  
She blinked. The Civic certainly looked different, though it was hard to say to what end.  
  
She wasn't sure if it had been silver to begin with. If it had, it definitely hadn't been as shiny as it was now. Gone were the dinky old bottom-rung hubcaps and all-season tires, replaced by gleaming thin-spoked caps and racetrack rubber. The back end was now dedicated to all manner of complex machinery, pumps and grates intertwining where the back windshield had been. A pair of fanning vents were mounted on and into the trunk, their flare giving its silhouette a newfound flair.  
  
The bad bitch, the heaping hunk of tinker scrap, was no longer on the table. From the looks of the car, it was probably stuffed somewhere in the trunk space. All the extra bits around there made more sense if they were needed to adapt someone else's stuff into her own. The idea that she might be breaking totally new ground with whatever she'd done here sent a hopeful little thrill through her, the first non-artificial excitement she'd felt all day.  
  
What really sent her heart hammering, though, were the changes she noticed in the doors and roof. There was no B-pillar anymore and each pair of front and back doors had been welded together. New gaps in the roof of the body suggested additional moveable segments, extending upwards from the original gaps of the doors and stopping just short of meeting in the middle. She spied bits of added hydraulics hidden beneath.  
  
“No. Nuh-uh.”  
  
She made a mad dash for her tool table, tossing its contents about. Not there. They weren't on her parts tables either. She was moving to crouch down by a pile of scraps when something fell out of the pocket of her daisy dukes and jangled to the floor.  
  
She picked up the keys to the Civic. A mechanically tumorous growth had attached itself to the clicker, adding two new buttons to its face, one green and one red. Hand shaking, she pressed the green button.  
  
With a click and a hiss, the combined doors on both sides unlocked and swung open.  
  
Vertically.  
  
“No goddamn _way_.”  
  
Shining silver, racing tires, fanned vents, and gull-wing doors.  
  
She’d turned the Civic into a _pseudo-DeLorean_.  
  
Test-driving her new toy wasn't just a matter of mechanic’s diligence anymore, now it was an absolute need. Her physical distresses became tertiary concerns at best.  
  
The five-seater interior had been renovated away in favor of two big bucket seats and a lot of leg and lean room. The cool leather soothed her sore thighs. A twist of the key brought the thing to life, its engine humming out a smooth, subtle purr.  
  
Oddly, though there was a number pad, clearly lifted from an old phone, there was no three-date display, or even any clock at all. She started to wonder if she'd neglected to include an essential component until she reached for the part of her power that fed her knowledge on how her vehicles worked. It urged her to punch in sequences she couldn't make heads or tails of. Confusing, but better than nothing.  
  
This was really happening.  
  
She double-checked that it was in park, then hopped out to smack the garage door button. As it _clink-clunk, clink-clunk_ ’ed its way open she moved on to a reappropriated file cabinet and dug into the ‘finishing touches’ drawer.  
  
When she was settled in the driver's seat again the way out and into the little parking area in front of the lighthouse was clear, and a pair of pink fuzzy dice dangled from the rear-view. A flick of a switch on the console brought the doors back down, clicked shut.  
  
Her whole arm was trembling as she reached down to the number pad. Usually, she could tell exactly what her creations would do, had an intuitive understanding of the what and a general sense of the how. This one, though… It could have been because she was on the steep precipice of sobriety, or because she had built it with someone else's tech, but she couldn't get a clear read on it. Punching in the numbers might do nothing. It might do something completely out of left field.  
  
It might do exactly what it looked like it did.  
  
Sherrel entered the numbers.  
  
The bad bitch in the back sparked to life, crackling and whirring, making the chassis shudder. Sherrel’s headache split her skull as her smile split her cheeks. She revved the engine and the garage was flooded with deafening noise. She let the tires squeal until the whole thing felt ready to fall to pieces.  
  
Then she let go of the brakes and everything lurched.  
  
One moment, she was starting to peel out of her garage, looking out at the country road, the surrounding trees, the cloudy sky.  
  
The next, she was crashing through postcard display stands and snowglobe-laden tables, and right after that, through a wide windowed storefront. Glass shattered and showered the hood and windshield like hail. Sherrel heard someone shriek, and couldn't be sure it wasn't herself.  
  
She pulled the e-brake before she could think about it, twisting the wheel clockwise to bring the car skidding sideways to a halt. She then killed the engine, flipped the switch to fold the doors open, tried to exit with grace, and promptly tripped and fell to the pavement. Pain forced her eyes closed for a long moment. When she could, she chanced a peek behind her.  
  
The car was covered in broken glass, mostly on the front end. The back end was in a different kind of trouble; she still wasn't sure how the Toybox tech worked, but it felt reasonable to assume that the copious clouds of black smoke spewing from the rear vents were a bad sign.  
  
She propped up on one elbow to get a look at the building past the car. The lighthouse was still there, but it wasn't the same. Its front was all cheery signage and shattered glass, no makeshift garage door, and its interior, while still in disarray, was in a totally new kind of disarray, one she didn't have the faculties to process at the moment. The tower itself was the same, but the sky it rose up into wasn't. It was cloudless, clear. Starry.  
  
Beautiful.  
  
The sound of someone gasping and panting cut through the pounding in her skull. She shifted to look in front of her.  
  
There was another woman on the ground, maybe a few yards away. She looked like she'd fallen on her ass and had only just managed to get her hands out behind her to stop her fall. She was around Sherrel’s age, early twenties, though much taller and much narrower than herself. A backpack hung by one shoulder strap. A single beer bottle lay dropped and broken by her side. Long, dark curls curtained big eyes, peeled wide, half-focused.  
  
Sherrel propped herself up on one arm, opened her mouth, and said “Sorry ‘bout almost killin’ you. This the future or what?”  
  
Or, rather, she would have, had the contents of her stomach not risen up her throat before words could. She vomited loudly, slumped onto her side, and lost her grip on her grease-smeared consciousness.


End file.
